Anduril Industries announced on Tuesday that its oven-sized satellite, Anduril-216, successfully demonstrated a long-wave infrared sensor capable of tracking adversary spacecraft during Earth’s eclipse periods.
The satellite launched in July on a SpaceX rideshare mission into an orbit approximately 590 kilometers, or 366 miles, above Earth, as Ars Technica reported. The spacecraft spends roughly one-third of each orbit in Earth’s shadow, a window where space tracking has historically suffered from visibility gaps.
Space is a warfighting domain, and custody of resident space objects during darkness has presented a persistent challenge for military operators. “You can’t fight in space if you can’t see in space,” Gokul Subramanian, an Anduril senior vice president and head of its space business, told reporters on Monday, according to Satellite Today.
The company funded the entire space demonstration using internal capital, constructing the spacecraft platform through a partnership with satellite-manufacturing startup Apex Space. Subramanian said that Anduril has no current plans to operate its own satellite production line.
Anduril’s long-wave infrared sensor isolates thermal emissions from spacecraft to maintain track custody when reflected solar illumination disappears. Adam Thurn, who runs Anduril’s orbital systems unit, explained the operational breakthrough to reporters.
“It provides a unique capability for us to witness when an adversary or other resident space objects are maneuvering during those eclipse periods, where in the past we’ve been fairly blind,” Thurn said.
The infrared payload exhibits low solar exclusion, meaning direct sunlight rarely blinds the optics. This design allows the sensor to operate through full darkness and near solar angles.
The sensor is capable of producing both unresolved point-source tracking and resolved imagery.
Beyond the primary sensor, the spacecraft carries two self-developed auxiliary payloads to test modular space infrastructure concepts internally referred to as Lectronimo. An over-provisioned mission compute module aboard the satellite fuses data from infrared and electro-optical sensors locally.
“The compute module is over provisioned with compute power and can run frontier artificial intelligence models and AI processing and includes a slotted card architecture for other parties to contribute software,” Subramanian told Satellite Today.
This edge-computing architecture generates tracking solutions autonomously in orbit without requiring analytical intervention from ground stations. A dynamic payload power module handles electrical conditioning for disparate bus designs.
Thurn said that these modular units address government demands to prevent buses and payloads from requiring complete re-engineering for every new mission.
Anduril positions itself as a mission systems integrator rather than a hardware merchant supplier. The current flight campaign is intended to mature internal software, engineering teams, and facility workflows.
The company maintains a workforce of over 350 people dedicated to its space division. Current commercial and defense objectives center on generating space domain awareness data packages for the United States military.
“At present, Anduril is not offering this system as a merchant supplier,” Subramanian said, adding that “that could change in the future.”
